Augmented Reality STEM Projects Funded by UW Reality Lab

The UW Reality Lab just announced that they are funding our work in augmented reality (AR) and STEM for elementary school learners. Our most recent project in this area, PrototypAR, was just accepted to IDC'19:

We are experiencing a historic moment: a worldwide pandemic, record-breaking unemployment rates, glaringly anti-education and anti-immigration rhetoric and policies from the White House (link), and now, protests and rightful anger about the unjust death of George Floyd and the systemic racism that plagues the US.
The Makeability Lab stands with the Black and African-American communities. We must all work together to combat the hate and racism and the social and economic injustices in our society. We must hold each other accountable—from our friends to our family members to our institutions. We must do more.
As an educator, as a father, and as a human, I am morally obligated and emotionally bound to proactively fight for a better future and help positively shape society.
I will use my privilege to fight.
Jon

The Columbus, OH deployment of Project Sidewalk was just covered by the local ABC news station. The 2.5 minute segment (view it here) featured Dean Allemang, one of the lead volunteers of the Project Sidewalk Columbus deployment.

Our paper on PrototypAR, an interactive tangible prototyping system that allows children to rapidly build, test, and iterate on their designs using augmented reality (AR) was accepted to the 2019 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference. PrototypAR combines lo-fidelity prototyping to facilitate iterative design, real-time AR feedback to scaffold learning, and a virtual simulation environment to support personalized experiments.

This is a large, collaborative project led by UMD PhD student Seokbin Kang along with Leyla Norooz, Elizabeth Bonsignore, Virginia Byrne, and Tammy Clegg!

Congratulations to Seokbin Kang who successfully defended his PhD proposal on "Augmented Reality Systems to Engage Children in Everyday STEM Experiences." Thank you to Professors Tammy Clegg and David Jacobs for serving on the committee and providing thoughtful feedback.

We design, build, and evaluate interactive tools and techniques to address pressing societal
challenges in accessibility, sustainability, education, and beyond.